The national War Museum had planned to disinter the remains of Jüri Vilms (1889–1918), a signatory of the Estonian Declaration of Independence and the first Deputy Prime Minister of Estonia, from his grave at the Pilistvere Andrease church cemetery in Viljandi County, due to long-running questions over whether the remains contained are really his.

According to the official narrative, Vilms was executed by firing squad in Finland in April 1918, at a time when both that country and Vilms' homeland were in the midst of devastating wars of independence, conflicts which also had aspects of civil war and as such were offshoots of the concurrent Russian Civil War.

War graves had in any case been under the spotlight since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, mainly due to questions over the status of such resting places if they were Soviet graves dating to World War Two.

The Vilms dispute began in July last year, when the Estonian Heritage Society and the War Museum planned the exhumation, which would also see DNA analysis take place – the museum was involved because Vilms' resting place is listed as a war grave.

That DNA analysis was supposed to be carried out in a laboratory in Austria, while bone examinations would have taken place in a Tallinn University lab as well.

However, the long-running court dispute which resulted last summer has ended, with an agreement between the Pilistvere congregation and the Estonian War Museum, confirmed at the second-tier Tallinn Administrative Court on February 9.

The War Museum is also partly compensating the congregation's legal expenses, and both parties say they now consider all disputes between them arising from the contested decision to be resolved.
Hellar Lill, the museum's director, noted that Vilms' true final resting place "will remain one of the mysteries of Estonian history."

The original planned exhumation was suspended by court order after the church congregation appealed, with congregation head Carl Heinrich Pruun calling the exhumation "desecration," and historian Jaak Pihlak calling it "absurd" and the stuff of conspiracy theories.

The Heritage Society appealed the court ruling in September, with the ultimate result being the agreement and circuit court ruling.

Vilms has no close relatives with legal authority to approve exhumation, though some distant descendants reportedly supported it.

Jüri Vilms was buried with honors at the family burial plot in Pilistvere cemetery after the Estonian warship Lennuk brought home from Finland his remains and those of his companions, in December 1920, by which time Estonia was an independent republic.

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